re is just one situation in which we all may feel for a short time as
lawyers feel habitually. Suppose that two inexperienced players sit down
to a game of chess, and that each is backed by a clever person who is
constantly giving him hints. The two backers represent the lawyers, and
the players represent their clients. There is not much disinterested
thought in a situation of this kind, but there is a strong stimulus to
acuteness.

I think that lawyers are often superior to philosophers in their sense
of what is relatively important in human affairs with reference to
limited spaces of time, such as half a century. They especially know the
enormous importance of custom, which the speculative mind very readily
forgets, and they have in the highest degree that peculiar sense which
fits men for dealing with others in the affairs of ordinary life. In
this respect they are remarkably superior to clergymen, and superior
also to artists and men of science.

The profession of medicine is, of all fairly lucrative professions, the
one best suited to the development of the intellectual life. Having to
deal continually with science, being constantly engaged in following and
observing the operation of natural laws, it produces a sense of the
working of those laws which prepares the mind for bold and original
speculation, and a reliance upon their unfailing regularity, which gives
it great firmness and assurance. A medical education is the best
possible preparation for philosophical pursuits, because it gives them a
solid basis in the ascertainable. The estimation in which these studies
are held is an accurate meter of the intellectual advancement of a
community. When the priest is reverenced as a being above ordinary
humanity, and the physician slightly esteemed, the condition of society
is sure to be that of comparative ignorance and barbarism; and it is one
of several signs which indicate barbarian feeling in our own
aristocracy, that it has a contempt for the study of medicine. The
progress of society towards enlightenment is marked by the steady social
rise of the surgeon and the physician, a rise which still continues,
even in Western Europe. It is probable that before very long the medical
profession will exercise a powerful influence upon general education,
and take an active share in it. There are very strong reasons for the
opinion that schoolmasters educated in medicine would be peculiarly well
qualified to train both bod